Advanced Developmental Psychology

1. PSY 620P Advanced Developmental Psychology

3. Daniel Messinger, Ph.D. Prosociality, Morality, and Effects of Abuse Empathy h/t Sarah

4. Overview • Prosociality/empathy • Developmental overview • Roots in infancy • Autism • Effortful control • Cowell & Decety • Maltreatment • Peer effects • Emotion recognition effects

5. Prosocial integrative model • Rises with age • Stronger in girls • Influenced by sociability, social competence, regulation of emotion • “Some consistency” in prosocial behavior • Strong situational influences • Diverse measures

6. Cross-cultural • Cultures in which children are more pro-social tend to involve extended families, strong female role, less division of labor • Reciprocal prosocial obligations valued as/more highly than individual obligation

7. Family factors • Good parenting  good empathy • Empathy springs from brain-based caregiving systems associated with mothering/parenting • De Waal; Panksepp (706) • Siblings caring for younger sibs • Kochanska

8. Discipline • Inductive parenting– ‘How do you think David feels?’ linked to pro-social behavior/sympathy • Power assertive techniques do not work as a modal technique, but can be important in a more reciprocal context • Authoritative parenting – warmth and control • Regulation of negative emotion • Plus role modeling for optimal prosociality • And providing early pro-social opportunities • Foot-in-the-door technique

9. Morality is implicitly interactive Acting with respect to the expectations of a generalized other—norms—expecting one’s actions to affect others.

10. “Participating in a synchronous exchange may sensitize infants to the emotional resonance and empathy underlying human relationships across the life span.” Feldman, 2007

11. Reunion

12. Early mother-infant synchrony  2 year self-control • Maternal synchronization at 3 months • Faster is better • Mutual synchronization at 9 months • More important for difficult temperament kids • Feldman et al 1999 • Mother-infant synchrony  dialogical empathy at 6/13 years • Feldman, 2007

13. Empathic Responding

14. Cooperation

15. Empathy  Autism Symptoms McDonald & Messinger, 2012

16. Prosocial behavior • Voluntary behavior intended to benefit another • Empathy – • Understanding-based feeling of what other is feeling • Sympathy – • Sorrow/concern for other • Linked to helping, HR down • Different from personal distress – • Self-focused aversive negative emotional reaction to other • Linked to getting out of there, HR up • So regulating negative emotion is important

17. Lower empathy expression at 4-6 years, but normative prosociality McDonald et al., 2015

18. Lower increase in ASD compliance from 2 – 3 years Ekas, et al., 2017

19. Oxytocin * Interaction  Empathy OXTR rs53576 children with the GG genotype appeared more susceptible to dyadic interaction quality than children with the AG genotype McDonald, et al., 2016

20. Effortful control • “[A] child's ability to inhibit a readily available, prepotent response or to stop an ongoing response to perform instead a more appropriately modulated response is implicated in multiple developmental processes and considered a hallmark in socialization.” • Typically viewed as a temperamental characteristic • Murray & Kochanska, 2002

21. By 45 months, effortful control stable longitudinally & across tasks • Less intense proneness to anger & joy, and more inhibited to unfamiliar in 2nd year  higher effortful control. • Higher effortful control (22–45 months)  stronger conscience at 56 months & fewer externalizing problems at 73 months. • Effortful control mediated the oft-reported relations between maternal power assertion and impaired conscience development in children, even controlling for child management difficulty. Kochanska, G., & Knaack, A. (2003). Effortful control as a personality characteristic of young children: antecedents, correlates, and consequences. J Pers, 71(6), 1087-1112.

22. Remember…. • GRAZYNA KOCHANSKA, REBECCA L. BROCK, AND LEA J. BOLDT

24. Background: babies tend to be positive • Preferential looking-time, violation-of-expectation tasks, and behavioral observations show that infants < 2 yr act prosocially and prefer prosocial (rather than antisocial) others • 3-mo-olds preferentially attend to a prosocial character • By 6 months, infants selectively attend to and approach prosocial agents • Neural and environmental mechanisms underlying their emergence remain unclear

25. What we do know so far: • Frontal power density asymmetry during rest and while viewing emotional stimuli is related to individual differences in emotion regulation, motivational processes, and social behavior • Possible that dispositions in parents shape children’s prosocial behavior and neural responses during third-party evaluations of social interaction • Parent/child value transmission = Gene x Environment interaction

26. Current Study • To investigate the link between the neural processing of third-party social evaluations and actual moral preferences and prosocial behaviors in infants and toddlers, and their link to parental values • Combined EEG with eye-tracking, behavioral measures, and parental and children’s dispositions

27. Hypotheses • Infants would differentiate between characters that helped another and characters that hindered another, indexed by EEG frontal asymmetry • Infants’ early, automatic, and later controlled time-locked neural responses to the perception of social interactions of others would predict their character preference • Parental dispositions would predict children’s neural processing of moral scenarios and their sharing behavior

28. Methods • 73 children: ages 12-24 months • Parents completed questionnaire • Early Childhood Behavior Questionnaire-VSF • Sensitivity to Justice Scale (short) • Interpersonal Reactivity Index • Social Evaluation Task (SET) • EEG & eye-tracking • Preferential Reaching Paradigm • 4-min resting state EEG • Chicago Moral Sensitivity Task (CMST) • EEG & eye-tracking • Sharing game

29. Results • No evidence of preferential reaching for prosocial character – (27 helper vs. 27 hinderer) • Near-equal numbers of children shared vs. did not share at least one toy (37 share vs. 34 no share) • Sharing associated with effortful control, but not positive or negative affect • Sharing associated with parent’s perspective-taking and (negatively) with parent’s personal distress

30. Results from SET • Greater cortical activation in helping vs. hindering condition • Greater left frontal asymmetry when viewing hindering vs. helping • Consistent with activation of avoidance response • Greater fixation on agent of helping vs. receiver of help • But no greater fixation on prosocial vs. antisocial action

31. Results from CMST • Greater amplitude for prosocial vs. antisocial scenes (parietal region; 300-500ms) • More computation required to process the prosocial, or the prosocial is more novel • No differences found 200-300ms (early window), or 600-1000ms (late window) • Prosocial reaching preferences predicted by individual differences in activation when perceiving helpful vs. harmful behavior (200-500ms & 600-1000ms) • Those individual differences in turn were predicted by parental sensitivity to injustice (300-500ms only)

32. Results From CMST

33. Results From CMST Social preferences associated with neural activation during CMST

34. Conclusions • Infants and toddlers distinguish between prosocial & antisocial acts • The distinctions appear rooted in basic processes of approach/withdrawal tendencies and attention • Good behaviors are more novel  elicit additional computations • Bad behaviors are more common  prompt an automatic response • Increased recruitment of resources/computations in processing the anticipation of prosocial outcomes compared with antisocial outcomes

35. Discussion Questions • What would contribute to such an early parent-child reflection of moral values? • How might these contributions be different for children with developmental disorders? • Do you think the processes and mechanisms of moral evaluation in young kids maintain with their increasing age?

36. Maltreatment

37. Family environment and maltreatment • Patterns seen across maltreatment types • Family environment of coercion and abuse of power • Lower levels of prosocial behavior and verbal communication • Undervaluing of children • Deviant affective displays • Maternal intrusiveness and non-responsiveness

38. Overlap with risky behaviors • Increased likelihood to engage in a greater array of risky behaviors • Certain types of maltreatment associated with a greater number of sexual partners and heavier alcohol consumption • Adult survivors likely to engage in substance abuse, criminal and antisocial behavior, and eating disorders

39. Social development and abuse • Maltreated children often suffer from low self-esteem, self-blame, and negative affect toward self • Abuse negatively impacts peer relationships particularly if its frequent and of long duration • The longer maltreatment occurs, the greater the likelihood of peer rejection, perhaps because of tendency to engage in coercive, aggressive interactions with peers as result of abuse • Though a strong friendship may attenuate this relationship • Investigated with 107 children experiencing various types of abuse and 107 comparison children between 2nd and 7th grade • Bolger et al 1998

40. Specificity of abuse effects • Sexual abuse predicted low self-esteem • but not peer relationship problems. • Emotional maltreatment was related to difficulties in peer relationships • but not to low self-esteem. • For some groups of maltreated children, having a good friend was associated with improvement over time in self-esteem. • Bolger et al., 1998

41. Chronically maltreated kids likely to be rejected by peers • Maltreatment chronicity  higher levels of aggressive behavior • reported by peers, teachers, and children • Aggressive behavior accounted for association of maltreatment and rejection. • Withdrawn behavior associated with peer rejection • but doesn’t account for association of chronic maltreatment & rejection. • Bolger & Patterson, 2001

42. Maltreatment, aggression, & rejection

43. Maltreatment  Aggression Results hold for girls and boys • Bolger & Patterson, 2001

44. Does abuse predict malfunction? • Many children/ adolescents who suffer maltreatment become well-functioning adults • Maltreatment can result in significant negative consequences that continue into adulthood • Although many survivors function well in adulthood, others suffer serious psychological distress and disturbance

45. Possible buffers • Maltreating parents may fail to produce opportunities for positive social interaction for their children • Opportunities found elsewhere (i.e., other family members, friends, teachers, etc.) • Maltreated children with best friends are more likely to experience increased self-esteem and self-concept than other maltreated children

46. Abused see more anger 8-11-year-olds Pollak & Tolley-Schell, 2003

47. sadness At expense of ? Pollak & Tolley-Schell, 2003

48. Heart rate in response to… Time only for non-abused • Active anger: Large initial deceleration for abused & non-abused children • Attentional orienting response • Unresolved anger: Eventual recovery from initial deceleration (only group effect, p<.05) • Resolution: Greaterrecovery for non-abused than abused children (bpm) Group, p<.05 Pollak, Vardi, Bechner, & Curtin (2005). Physically Abused

49. Impact on emotion recognition • Influence of early adverse experience on children's selective attention to threat-related signals is a mechanism in the development of psychopathology. • As children's experience varies, so will their interpretation of emotion expressions. • Pollak & Tolley-Schell. Journal of Abnormal Psychology. 112(3), Aug 2003, 323-338.